March 19

Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka with Love is a game full of different characters talking to each other. In fact, some puzzles can be solved only by choosing the right dialogue option. That’s why in today’s episode of Behind the Irony Curtain we’d like to tell you more about the process of creating dialogues in our game.

Writing dialogues is just the beginning of the process. There are over 5471 lines of text in Irony Curtain and every one of them needs to be properly inserted into the game, to make sure all characters say exactly what Game Designer wants, in the exact time and place.

Here’s how it looks in Irony Curtain:

1. Every game character usually has more than one dialogue line. One of the ways to operate it is to use logical TRUE/FALSE flags. These flags helps us determine the state of knowledge of a specific character or whether an event of which the character speaks has already taken place.

2. Each dialogue is built in the editor as a separate “tree” consisting of successive “nodes” connected with each other by lines defining the order in which the dialogue of the character appears.

3. To be honest, “writing” dialogues is just filling the form fields. It looks more or less like this:

Create a new dialogue in the editor and give it a name. Then inform Level Designer about the circumstances in which it should be launched (eg. when Evans checks on the Prisoner);

Create the first Node (a red dot on the editor screen) and enter the necessary information (into the form on the right side of the screen):

Who is talking

The Dialogue text (or several dialogues if they should be drawn)

(Optional) The Dialogue text when repeating the talk

(Optional) If the dialogue happens not on the location but on zoom – whose head and on which side should it be displayed

(Optional) Text display time (it’s useful when testing the game without recorded Voice Overs which determine the text display time in the finished game)

Where the text should appear on the screen (e.g. over the character or over the radio speaker)

(Optional) Actions to be made before or after the dialogue (e.g. acquiring an item or activating a logic flag “character X already knows about Y")

Create another dialogue node and fill it in

Connect the first node with the second one

Rinse & Repeat ;)

4. After creating the entire “tree” for all the dialogues we generate so-called “keys”. Keys consist of the location number, dialogue name, text position in the tree and the first letter specifying the character.

5. Thanks to this we can assign a specific Key to a Node, and not just the text. All texts with Keys can be saved to a shared Excel sheet with different languages. As a result, the different language versions of the game have the appropriate dialogues.

That is all in this episode of Behind the Irony Curtain. We hope you enjoyed it and don't forget to add Irony Curtain to wishlist!

1. The whole process starts with the Game Designer. They prepare a documentation with all animations needed for the specific part of the game. There are several types of animations for example: idle animation, talking, specific animation for beginning or end of the conversation and custom animation.

2. Then the animator prepares everything that was requested in the specification in an animation software (we use Toon Boom Harmony for that). First comes the rough sketch, then the more detailed lineart and some colors and shadows at the end.

3. When the animation is ready, the animator exports each frame as a separate file. Our animations have usually 80 frames on average, so it’s a lot of files to export! Those files are put into our inhouse tool that does all the magic – cropps them, sets the frame’s size and creates a file that manages animating all the cropped images.

4. Now it’s time for the Level Designer. They use the graph you see below (a kind of a state diagram) to control which animation should be used in which state (e.g., idle or end of the conversation) by referencing the files generated during step 3.

About This Game

Nightmares from the Deep: The Siren`s Call is the sequel to the smash hit Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart.This epic adventure features an exciting plot full of outstanding puzzles and unforeseeable twists and turns.When Sarah Black, curator at the Caribbean Naval Museum, receives a package from a mysterious messenger, she is unwittingly drawn into an ancient conflict. Inside the package she finds an artifact, and instantly assailants descend on the museum to rob her. The artifact is stolen. Sarah lowers her head in disbelief as she realizes that again she is falling headfirst into a nightmare from the deep.

Next Sarah finds herself on the shores of Kingsmouth, a forgotten fishing town which holds an incredible secret. A would-be messenger reveals the sad truth: he and the rest of the town’s denizens are suffering from a curse that is gradually turning them into ghoulish, mutated ocean creatures… a curse that was cast by none other than the mayor, Murray, and the old sea-devil himself, Davy Jones.